Condensed and Curated.

The Pacifist.

The understanding that the atheist experiences the same sensation as the spiritual, simply because it is and always has been part of the human experience, reveals something about belief that is far more impactful. We are forced through our mutual experience to acknowledge that the belief of another cannot be more or less justified then our own. To be convinced that we are is to ignore what belief is. The atheist who professes to not believe in something greater ignores the fact that they themselves can often not help feeling the same. We forget that had we been born in any other society at any other place in time we would have more than likely experienced the spiritual enlightenment of those around us.

What we believe then is a product of our surrounding and our conditioning. The atheist has often arrived at that conclusion through the study of sciences, conditioning themselves to not believe and often has this reinforced through the Sagan’s, Feynman’s and Tyson’s of our world. They find community in forums, classrooms and studies in the same way the religious finds them in churches, holy sites and pilgrimage.

It is often forgotten that truth is built out of the way we understand the environment and rationality is just piecing that truth together without self-contradiction. The monks of the middle ages spent exhaustive hours fully fleshing out the Christian belief in the same way the scientist works today. It is natural to find look at religious beliefs from a scientific perspective and find contradictions. It would be surprising to not find them as they are entirely separate systems, in the same way a Buddhist may find contradiction in Islam.

Nearly every distinct religious tradition will be able to find contradiction and weak logic in another, they are not built with the other in mind after all. They all, however, serve the exact same purpose. They are the local understanding how to achieve local peace or peace in the next life, science is not different. We study the biology of crops so that we can better feed the people. We seek to understand so that we can implement solutions and we tend not to study the things that have no benefit to them, luckily for the scientist almost everything has value to understanding. We believe that improving things will reduce total suffering.

Some may argue that the scientific tradition is superior because those other beliefs have led to brutal acts of cruelty and oppression. This is a false equivalence, they instead merely acted as the mechanism with which the deed was carried out. The belief does kill, it is the imposition of the belief onto another that kills. Christianity created an understanding of Christian ownership of the holy land, acting on it created the crusades. Science created an understanding of atomic energy, acting on it created the atomic bomb.

Once this is understood it becomes obvious that there is no belief more right or wrong then another, they are all relative. What can be understood as true, however, is that the imposition onto another is what leads to such terrible results. The Pacifist, one who does not impose belief, is the only one who can have a true claim to a universal truth. Someone who believes that bodies must covered in order to be free, is as justified as one who believes that freedom can only be found in nudity. It is forcing another to adopt their belief that is wrong. One is allowed to make their belief known, but they cannot have it enforced.

Law, therefore, should not reflect the customs of a single tradition of belief but instead be an institution that seeks to protect the individual from being imposed on by another.